The Camorra in late 19th century Naples
[abridged excerpts from Frank M. Snowden, Naples in the time of cholera, 1884–1911 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); photographs of Naples by Giorgio Sommer (1834–1914)]
View from San Martino, 1880s
With a population of nearly half a million people occupying an area of 8 square kilometers, Naples in 1884 was the largest city in Italy. A great Mediterranean seaport famous for evil smells and foul water, the city faced south onto the Bay of Naples, stretching for three miles in an arc along the coast. To the traveller arriving by sea, Naples rose above the harbour in the shape of an amphitheatre. The Lower City, built on land reclaimed from the Mediterranean, formed the stage. It was enclosed to the north and west by a semicircle of hills; to the east by swamps; and to the south by the waters of the Bay. To the west stood the small and salubrious neighbourhood of Chiaia; to the east, the teeming slums of the Old City. The slopes of the encircling hills were graced by the elegant homes of the Upper City.
The dominant feature of the economy, as of every facet of Neapolitan life, was the enormous disproportion between the size of the population and the limited resources available. By the time of the 1884 catastrophe [N.B. a cholera epidemic], Naples had become the symbol of the intractable 'Southern Question' in Italian history. Before the unification of Italy, as after, the great majority of Neapolitans lived in poverty, squalor, and ill health. There was a privileged minority of merchants, nobles, industrialists, functionaries and members of the liberal professions. They lived in the Upper City or in such isolated pockets of gentility as the Via Toledo in the Lower. For the mass of the working population, conditions were stark.
Average Italian wages were the most meagre in Europe, and Neapolitan wages were the lowest among major Italian cities. The most fortunate Neapolitan wage earners were the limited numbers of male industrial workers – dockers, engineers, metallurgical workers, and labourers for the railroads and trams. Competition in a radically overcrowded labour market depressed their wages. Far more numerous were the tens of thousands of craftsmen in a multitude of tiny workshops located throughout the Lower City. Some of the trades had flourished in earlier centuries, by the nineteenth century, however, the undercapitalized workshops of the city were caught in a downward spiral of decline. A special and wretched case was that of the 10,000 fishermen and their families who lived in the neighbourhood of S. Lucia, one of the most unhealthy slums in Naples. Descending further in the social scale, one encounters the myriad Neapolitans who earned their living directly in the streets. It was characteristic of the ailing local economy that tens of thousands of people subsisted by peddling their wares amidst the filth of the city lanes and alleys. The most monstrous feature of the city, however, was that its social structure genuinely approximated the shape of a pyramid. Broadening remorselessly from top to bottom, it rested on the most abject and numerous stratum of all – the unemployed. Nowhere else in western Europe was there such a concentration of the totally destitute, of people who woke in the morning not knowing when they would next eat, or where they would sleep.
A city already desperately poor in the first half of the century experienced a steady economic and social decline in the second. A major cause for the continuous expansion of misery after 1861 was unification itself, which destroyed the greatest resource the city possessed – its status as a royal capital. With the overthrow of the Bourbons, the port and the arsenal languished; the luxury trades withered; and the rich veins of royal patronage and military spending were exhausted.
Porta della Marina del Vino, 1880-1885
Naples possessed in the Camorra one of the most powerful criminal associations in modern European history. Like the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra clothed itself in populist rhetoric, proclaiming itself the champion of the poor and the defender of the South. It veiled the reality of the unpitying oppression that it meted out. The Camorra adopted mysterious jargon and rites that mimicked those of a secret society; it flaunted a pseudo-chivalric code of 'honour' among its members; and it created a mythology of distributive justice in which it claimed the role of urban Robin Hood. In reality, however, the Camorra was itself a symptom of the social pathology of modern Naples, and it added immeasurably to the burdens of the poor.
With its stronghold in the Lower City, the Camorra is best understood as a means of market rationalization. The destitute furnished the mass of members of the Neapolitan underworld, and in a society dominated by mass unemployment and poverty, there was a constant threat of an oversupply of recruits to the life of crime. The criminal trade, like virtually every other craft in the city, was in danger of being swamped. The Camorra restored order and profitability by rigidly and violently restricting entry to the profession. What was not to be tolerated was freelance criminality. For criminal purposes the city was divided into fourteen families or 'societies', one to each neighbourhood where the organization had an effective presence. In some cases the territory claimed by a 'society' corresponded to one of the administrative boroughs of the city as in Mercato and Pendino, but more frequently the territory was smaller, with a preponderance of 'societies' in the Lower City. Within its territory a Camorra 'society' was not a kinship network, but a monopoly that enforced its claim to a percentage of all illegal activity. The Camorra ruled without competition in its chosen domains of prostitution, illegal gambling, 'protection', money-lending and theft. The Camorra was a guild by other means: it protected the standard of living of its members by a rigid policy of exclusion guaranteed by the threat of violence. In a city famous for criminal activity, the striking feature of illegality, according to the police, was that almost every illegal deed had the sanction of the Camorra.
S. Lucia, circa 1857–1888
Through the monopoly of criminality in a neighbourhood and the willingness of its members to resort to violent means, the Camorra achieved a domination over large areas of the economic and political life of the city. An important premise for the establishment of its power was the weakness of authority under both the old regime and the new. In their final years before the national revolution, the Bourbons made use of the services of camorristi to enforce, if not law, then at least a kind of order. As the inspector in command of the police in the borough of Montecalvario explained in 1875, 'Under the old regime of the Bourbons, the Camorra was an underworld society in the service of crime and the authorities... who not only tolerated but also protected it.' After the change of regime, the new Liberal administration in the city confronted a turbulent interregnum. To secure control, it colluded with organized crime. Liborio Romano, who presided over the change of regime in the city, made use of the Camorra as an auxiliary police force. Thus the Camorra thrived as never before during the Risorgimento because authority was weak and for a time it was the only organized force in Naples. In every sphere its influence was also favoured by the small-scale operations, the weakness, and the lack of organization of its victims. Large-scale industry, major landowners, an organized working class and consumers integrated into a highly developed civil society would have been less susceptible to its predations. But the isolated, demoralized and impoverished members of the Neapolitan plebe were ideal for victimization. As Marc Monnier wrote,
Individuals were scattered, and this population of isolated people could offer no collective resistance to the oppression of powerful and violent minorities. The only ones to possess an organization, they dominated and triumphed with impunity.
In this fragmented civil society the Camorra established a well-organized protection racket at the expense of defenceless small retailers, who passed a share of the cost onto consumers in the form of higher prices. By intimidation, blackmail, and favouritism it 'made' the elections of councillors and deputies. The Camorra also gained powerful friends by eliminating their rivals for contracts for the performance of municipal services. In this manner the 'low Camorra' of the streets increased its influence by gaining access to the collusion of the powerful. The shadowy 'high Camorra' of polite society was created.
Political corruption increased the distance between governors and governed. At the turn of the century the famous lawsuit of the Neapolitan deputy and Camorra boss Alberto Casale against the local newspaper, La Propaganda, revealed a systematic falsification of the electoral will of the population. Beginning with the precedent created in the 1870s by the Liberal Deputy Rocco De Zerbi, powerful figures in the local administration comprehensively perverted the electoral process, eliminating opponents from the registers of eligible voters; bribing undecided citizens with contracts, employment and cash; and hiring members of the criminal underworld to disrupt the campaigns of the opposition. On polling day in sezioni like Vicaria it was unsafe for the supporters of rival political factions to walk the streets. Elections conducted in such a fashion undermined the legitimacy of those in office.
~ Frank M. Snowden, Naples in the time of cholera, 1884–1911 (abridged excerpts)
P.S. CrimethInc. recently published an article on the 1884 cholera epidemic in Naples and Errico Malatesta's relief efforts, drawing from Frank Snowden's book for background. The presence of the Camorra in the city is summarised thus: “Illegal capitalist organizations set the price of food and worked with the municipal authorities to control what kind of criminal activity was possible.” Which on one hand is hilarious in how it avoids using the words “Camorra” or “mafia”, but on the other hand... honestly? Fair. The business of the mafia IS buisness.
